Members will recall the young soprano,Rachel Bate, who won the Choir’s Joan Carden Award (JCA) in 2010 and went on to win the Mathy Award and the German Opera Award in October of the same year. As a consequence of winning the JCA, Rachel was invited by Christopher Bowen to sing Beethoven’s ‘Ah, Perfido’ in our ‘Romantik Meets Klassik’ concert in May this year , and made a great fist of this challenging concert aria.

Rachel has been in Köln for six months of the year’s attachment to the opera there, which comes with the German Opera Award. She reports that the opera house has been very welcoming and friendly and she has performed in her first opera in the Köln Opera House, the children’s opera ‘Die Feuerrote Friederike’ (the red-headed girl named Friederike), which was “a great success and lots of fun in a non-threatening environment” (Köln, like other German opera houses, has a tradition of mounting productions for children at Christmas time, something that Opera Australia might consider). As well, Rachel has performed in a number of concerts, which, as she puts it, have given her the opportunity tp perform some great arias and “quite a bit of Brahms, Fauré and Rutter (Who?) repertoire”.

Rachel says that she would of course be very interested to do some more work with us next year upon her return, “as it was so lovely being involved in May this year”, and sends her best wishes for Christmas to the Choir and to “Maestro Bowen”.